In Filipino, we have the word “napipisil” — meaning, idiomatically, someone one favors or chooses to love.
Ricky Abad once screamed at an actress because she pronounced it as “naPIpiSIL”, the accent on the second and final syllable, which technically is standard Filipino. But he wanted it pronounced with an additional emphasis on the first syllable, “NApipiSIL”.
“NApipiSIL! NApipiSIL!” he bellowed, his forehead vein about to burst. He said it was a trick he learned from National Artist Rolando S. Tinio to make poetic Filipino sound even more mellifluous. Try it: “NApipiSIL”, and not just “naPIpiSIL.”
They say the devil is in the details.
Ricky was the devil.
Ricky was famous for his dramatic temper during rehearsals, flinging chairs, props and one time, Chickenjoy (with gravy ha) to startle actors back into shape.
Pace our champions of healthy workplaces – thank you for your work – but, boy, do I miss the thrill of those days. With Ricky, it was never power-tripping, but the excess energy of a man ever radioactive with theatricality. It was joie de vivre, the need to extract every bit of beauty out of every moment onstage.
He didn’t rail at you because you were beneath him, but because he was right there with you in the scene, feeling your feelings, thinking your thoughts. And when the actor gave anything less than utter gorgeousness, it ticked him off and cut his mojo. He did not settle for anything less than what would make you proud of your own work.
Many years later, I asked him about his temper. He said, “When I started winning awards and recognitions and getting older, I realized that was all so unnecessary.” We laughed.
Ricky was no relic from the past. He was constantly learning. His art stayed fresh, dangerous, teetering on the edge of failure. Ricky was a genuine artist-intellectual. His deconstruction of the classics reflected his politics, but he eschewed preachiness and sloganeering. He criticized the limitations of social realist playwriting and constantly encouraged us to explore the political possibilities of ritual and abstraction.
Theater to him was a social tool. He taught storytelling and performance to the Bilibid inmates, and even directed them in Shakespearean comedy! At 70-plus years, he was still the youngest, freshest, most forward-thinking director among us in the Ateneo.
Outside rehearsals, Ricky was a teddy bear, an awarded professor of sociology, a jokester, a town idiot, a taskmaster, a mad prophet, a quixotic dreamer. He dreamt the Fine Arts Department into being in 2000, and Roleplayers, a company that empowers corporate employees by teaching them theater.
He loved his students and his students loved him. He was a hugger and beso-to-the-cheek kind of guy. He would often run out of cigarettes because we always bummed off him. This was a man who would never forget the day you handed him a banana to cheer him up; who would force himself to laugh at your dumbest jokes; who would insist on buying you a bucket of
horse-piss beer and overpriced nachos because you’re brokenhearted.
He offered us fatherly guidance, deep friendship and unconditional generosity when we needed it most. He was always on your team as the cheerleader you never thought you needed.
And Ricky was the best writer of recommendation letters — he wrote them like touching love letters that could make you cry.
He loved the theater, he loved the Filipino, he loved us his students and he loved his wife, Lizette.
His passing is the end of an era in Ateneo theater. We can only strive to do his legacy justice. Many of us are hurting because we have lost someone dear. Someone we deeply loved. And someone who chose to love us.
Napipisil.
(Ricky Abad — actor-director, professor of sociology and beloved mentor to generations of theater/arts students and practitioners — died on 26 December 2023 at age 77.)